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TS Creates La Cañada Flintridge’s New Website

When the City of La Cañada Flintridge (LCF) decided to upgrade its 10-year-old website, LCF staff turned to Tripepi Smith to create a new website that is easy-to-use and has optimal accessibility features.

Over the course of five months, Tripepi Smith designed, developed and delivered a new platform for La Cañada Flintridge that presents information through a clean, modernized and user-friendly design and simplifies the user experience. The new website was launched on September 3, 2019.

“The City recognized that our website was the weakest link in our communication strategy. We value public input and transparency, and while we have seen a lot of progress in the City in the last several years, the website always failed to reflect that progress. We knew it was time for a change,” said Arabo Parshegian, division manager at the City of La Cañada Flintridge. “Following a competitive bidding process, we chose Tripepi Smith for the project. Tripepi Smith was communicative throughout the entire process and they brought ideas and solutions to the discussion. Their understanding of local government enabled them to deliver a website that exceeded our expectations. The site will serve our residents for years to come.”

Led by Senior Business Analyst Melanie James, the firm implemented a number of helpful tools and necessary modifications to the City’s website including:

An SSL certification

SEO optimization

Language translation with more than 14 language options and ADA compliance

Social media integration

Calendar integration

Blog/newsfeed

Document manager

Custom forms

FAQs for each City department

“While redesigning the City’s website, our main goal was to improve the functionality of the website so residents could easily find the information they need and stay connected with the City,” Melanie said. “We recognize the increasingly significant role a City’s website holds in working with the community, and we work to develop functional platforms that meet the needs of City staff and residents.”

In addition, Tripepi Smith created a color scheme that reflected La Cañada Flintridge’s branding and showcased its recent logo update. The dark green, light green and orange colors offer a fresh look to the website while making it easy to explore.

The website’s design uses large landscape images to break up chunks of text, colorful homepage buttons to provide convenient shortcuts and a footer with columns for the City’s news feed, upcoming events and social media feeds to effectively use all of the given space.

Finally, emergency popups and the ability to create landing pages were added to the website so residents could quickly find pertinent information in the event of a local emergency. Those have proved particularly helpful as the City has responded to the coronavirus pandemic.

Tripepi Smith also trained City staff to manage the website and remain available to remedy any website issues on an adhoc basis. The WordPress content management platform is an open-source, commonly used framework for website development. The shift to non-proprietary platforms to deliver websites for public agencies is proving popular as cities move to avoid technology lock-ins.

The City of La Cañada Flintridge is a bedroom community of over 20,000 residents and 6,750 households nestled against the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California. La Cañada Flintridge is scenically located at the base of the Angeles National Forest; it is a short drive to the urban centers of downtown Pasadena, Glendale, and Los Angeles. With a tradition of limited government, City Hall is committed to providing residents with a high level of service while keeping government small.